Monthly Archives: January 2012

I don’t have anything finished to show today, but how about pictures of my latest fabric wants?

This past weekend, I started working with the grey fairy-tale print Liberty of London I bought myself over Christmas–my first time using any really “nice” fabric in over a year. So of course I now want ALL my fabric to be Liberty, and of course Liberty has obliged me by coming out with new spring prints:

Becci C–can’t you see this as a tunic with contrast bands around the neck?And here’s Gilliam A, which is telling me it wants to be some sort of ladylike tie-neck blouse.(Hey, my budget and I can dream, right?)

1. Let’s just say, hypothetically, that you are going on a date for the first time in 4.5 years. What do you do? How do you act? Fortunately, Mystery Science Theater 3000 has found us this educational film, “What to Do On a Date.”

“How about a weenie roast?” “Nick, NO!”

2. Related but not as funny, this essay about a first dance could have been written by me, down to the dress I was so convinced I had to have and the inevitable disappointment: I cried because I’d believed with all my being that once I put on eyeshadow and a turquoise dress, I’d turn into a heroine of any of the slumber-party movies I’d watched. […] I cried because at that moment, in a gymnasium decorated with crepe paper so that the gifted kids could feel not just smart but glamorous, I began to understand that not everything would come easy to me, and that some forms of failure could be intangible, inexpressible, and nonetheless undeniable. I cried because I wanted to be seen, and because nobody was ready or willing to see me.

In late winter I always revisit Russian music, and lately it’s been Shostakovich. How about the finale to his Fifth Symphony to get your blood going this morning?

He wrote this after managing to get on Stalin’s bad side with an opera and after pulling his Fourth Symphony to not further anger the dictator. The party was pleased with the Fifth (which the composer subtitled “A Soviet Artist’s Practical Creative Reply to Just Criticism”), but, as Shostakovich later wrote:

I think it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat… It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, “Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,” and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, “Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.”…You have to be a complete oaf not to hear that.

Around Christmas, I was talking to my yoga teacher and it came out that I knit. And she asked, “Can you make me some legwarmers?”

Because I feel the same way about my yoga teacher as I did about a few early grade school teachers (“You’re so pretty! And so calm! And you’re good at so many things I’m not!”), I said of course I would (“Teacher asked me to do a special project! Yay!”).

I’m using this pattern but left off the foldover cuff, as you can see. I left it off because I wasn’t sure I’d have enough yarn for it, but now I’m pretty certain I will. So do I go back to the first one and add it? I don’t know if the drawstring would be fiddly during yoga or if it would help with the fit.

I was up Millcreek in the snow yesterday, climbing through the forest, and thought of the last chapter of A Moveable Feast where Papa talks about spending the winter in Austria, skiing and climbing through the forest:

No one could afford a broken leg. There were no ski patrols. Anything you ran down from, you had to climb up. That gave you legs that were fit to run down with.

[…] But climbing was fun and no one minded it in those days. You set a certain pace well under the speed at which you could climb, and it was easy and your heart felt good and you were proud of the weight of your rucksack. Part of the climb up to the Madlener-Haus was steep and very tough. But the second time you made that climb it was easier, and finally you made it easily with double the weight you had carried at first.

1. A dear friend suffered a terrible loss this week, so putting up funny links or MST3K quotes doesn’t feel right today. Instead, I will tell you to travel safely and hug your loved ones and try to make your part of the world more full of light.

2. I’ll also give you a space picture, since that’s how I cope:(Click the image to see it bigger–every speck of light you see is a galaxy.)

This was the last image featured on The Atlantic’s space Advent calendar. As the caption there said: This Hubble image is one of several, including the Ultra Deep Field, which peer into seemingly empty space, leaving the camera shutter open for hours, and reveal that billions of galaxies made up of billions of stars fill our skies in every direction as far as we can possibly see, separated by almost unimaginable distance and time, yet still reachable, visible as an image of their long-ago selves.

Sometimes you just need to read some Raymond Chandler at the end of a workday and have Phil Marlowe give you some perspective. Marlowe would have no patience for hippie platitudes or Rilke quotes, but even he knows that it’s important to be a good human. Or at least try to be:

I stepped out into the night air that nobody had yet found out how to option. But a lot of people were probably trying. They’d get around to it.

I drove on to the Oxnard cut-off and turned back along the ocean. The big eight-wheelers and sixteen-wheelers were streaming north, all hung over with orange lights. On the right the great fat solid Pacific trudging into shore like a scrubwoman going home. No moon, no fuss, hardly a sound of the surf. No smell. None of the harsh wild smell of the sea. A California ocean. California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing. Here we go again. You’re not human tonight, Marlowe.

All right. Why should I be?…Who am I cutting my throat for this time? …All I know is that something isn’t what it seems and the old tired but always reliable hunch tells me that if the hand is played the way it is dealt the wrong person is going to lose the pot. Is that my business? Well, what is my business? Do I know? Did I ever know? Let’s not go into that. You’re not human tonight, Marlowe. Maybe I never was or ever will be…Maybe we all get like this in the cold half-lit world where always the wrong thing happens and never the right.